A scary number for the president in the new NBC/Wall St Journal poll shows 62% saying, if Obama is reelected, that they want to see major changes from him. Mark Halperin says this spells trouble.

The number in there that says people want a changed Obama agenda is a huge number - it's higher than what people wanted from George W. Bush in 2004... He has said 'give me four more years to finish what I've started.' That number suggests people don't want him to finish, they want a change in direction...

The new poll from NBC News has some nice nuggets, much juicer than showing the race tied at 47% when the president led by 5 in their September poll. For example, as much as the media loves talking about Romney's girl trouble, it's the president who suffers a gender gap, but even though their gender numbers favor Romney, they're still calling it his problem!

... Romney's gender gap narrows when you move from registered voters to likely voters -- Obama's lead with women shrinks to eight points (51 percent to 43 percent), and Romney's advantage with men grows to 10 points (53 percent to 43 percent).

On the big economic issues on which the election hangs - like job creation - Romney is leading.

Romney also has the advantage on jobs and unemployment (46 percent to 39 percent) and the federal budget deficit (48 percent to 35 percent).

And by a four-point margin (45 percent to 41 percent), voters think Romney is better prepared to create jobs and improve the economy over the next four years.

Bad for Romney is the rather odd optimism that seems to have taken hold.

Forty-five percent believe the economy will improve in the next 12 months. That's up one point from the last poll and a whopping 18 points since July. What's more, 41 percent think the country is headed in the right direction, which is the highest mark on this question since June 2009.

Why does silly stuff - like Obama proudly saying that Mitt is suffering from Romneysia - dominate the presidential campaign? Since the president doesn't see himself winning over any voters who aren't behind him already, he's trying to make sure his voters are energized. GOP consultant Matthew Dowd takes explains.

This election is all about the base, in my view, and the enthusiam of the support...

I agree with this thought, as expressed by former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan, that there's an amorphous storm brewing in the electorate - and I think it just might result in a strong Romney surge at the end, a surge only being detected realistically in the Gallup poll.

There is a sense out there that the American people are up to something that we don't know about, and just might be about to hand us some surprise that they've been cooking up...

... one of the narratives that the Obama campaign has laid out is that bin Laden is dead... and that al Qaeda is in retreat. And you start to wonder that they basically do not allow any story to emerge that counters that narrative. Is that why for two weeks they told us that the Libyan incident in Benghazi was a popular uprising and not a terrorist attack because it ran counter to their campaign narrative???

Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport explains why party identification isn't a factor they take into consideration in doing their polling.

We do not weight by party at all - we never have and we don't now. We think party identification is an attitudinal variable that fluctuates just like who you're going to vote for...

When criticizing polls, people point to the number of people tallied from each party as a sign of bias, so Newport's explanation is intruiguing. Before the first debate, when Obama lead, the right was complaining about methodology, but with Gallup consistently showing Romney ahead by 6 points, now the left is mad.

A good rule of thumb is that anything Democrats accuse Republicans of doing is something Democrats are guilty of themselves. Watch the liberal senate candidate in Arizona, Richard Carmona, prove the point by warring on women and comparing his male debate moderator with Candy Crowley.

After a heated exchange during Thursday’s debate, moderator Brahm Resnik remarked: “Geez, now I know how Candy Crowley felt.”

Carmona was already under attack by Republican Jeff Flake for his treatment of women.

The simple 30-second spot, based off a POLITICO story from May, features Carmona’s former supervisor, Cristina Beato, looking straight into the camera and recalling the surgeon general pounding on her door in the middle of the night.

“The ad just appears very believable. … The ad in and of itself — it’s a good ad,” said one top Arizona Democrat who supports Carmona. “They’re trying to insinuate he’s got a woman problem. Their problem is that it’s a singular incident that doesn’t play into a larger narrative.”